Creative Tech Gifts for Valentines Day

Flowers, candy and jewelry are so last century, not to mention gender specific. Did you know that in Japan women give chocolates to men and men don’t give gifts on Valentines Day at all? Ladies, if we want gifts, let’s at least be reciprocal.

We came up with a few Valentines Day tech gifts for both men and women that we think break the mold of the usual fare. Hopefully one of these will appeal to you or might lead to a creative gift idea of your own.

Portable Hard Drive Loaded With Memory Photos

Photo Montage by Ray Gordon

Back in the day, mix tapes were a very nice hand-made offering to a loved one. Today high capacity portable pocket-sized hard drives are surprisingly low cost and very useful. Why not fill a small portion of a new drive with photos special to your special guy or gal before presenting. Very personalized and very valuable!
We examined a variety of these drives at the Consumer Electronic Show in January that we look forward to reviewing for you soon. For Valentines Day, our featured pick is the Verbatim Acclaim 320 GB USB Portable External Hard Drive.

The Verbatim Acclaim series of portable hard drives are among the smallest portable hard drives we’ve seen. The drive comes in capacities ranging from 320GB all the way up to one terabyte (1,000GB), which is plenty of room for back-ups and important files you’d like to carry with you. Even the smallest capacity drive (320GB) can hold over 100,000 (10MB) JPEG photos or up to 80,000 songs. The series comes in various colors (black, blue, red and pink), but not all colors are available for each capacity model. All the Acclaim drives connect via a supplied USB cable, making it easy to connect to virtually any computer.

High Tech Beach Mat for Two Eliminates Sand

Photo courtesy of CGear Sand-Free Ltd

The CGear Sand-Free Multimat can be used for the beach, picnics, camping or other outdoor experiences alone or with a beach towel. Keep your cuddling experience sand and dirt free. Their unique, patented two-layer mesh allows sand and dirt to fall through without coming back up from below. This mat is easy to pack up and carry – and you won’t be carrying home half the beach or pounds of dirt.

The MultiMat has a tech background – this product was originally developed for the military in Australia as a helicopter landing pad, eliminating surface dirt and sand to prevent the disorienting dust cloud common in helicopter landings in dry, dusty places.

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Even those of you who hate Valentines Day might enjoy it more if you take the time to dream up a creative alternative to the usual commercial Valentines Day products.

About Linda Sherman

International, multicultural marketing pro, Linda brings a distinguished background of international subsidiary CEO/CMO to her Social Marketing expertise. These include CEO Club Med Japan, Barilla Japan and CMO Wal-Mart Japan. Linda Sherman has been featured and quoted in Forbes, The New York Times, Christian Monitor and other leading publications. She devised and implemented an innovative guerrilla-marketing plan for ZIMA in Japan that produced a lasting, profitable success. Linda has hands-on technical skills in building and search optimizing WordPress websites and an influential on-line presence. Linda teaches social marketing for business at the University of Hawaii. Her company, The Courage Group, provides websites, digital film, branding and social marketing strategy and training.